IV
I shall shortly exemplify this argument with regard to Marx's analyses of state and law. But first, a clarification. I have tentatively suggested the identification of superstructures and Erscheinungsformen elsewhere (Corrigan and Sayer, 1978; Sayer 1983: 80–1), but in ways which are likely to be misleading.6 The same goes, more generally, for my account of ideology in Marx's Method. My concern there, as here, was to deny the independence both of consciousness from experience and of politics, law, and so on, from what Marx understood by economic structure'. My language, however, tended to suggest that the relations at issue could be adequately comprehended in terms of structural ‘correspondences'. This was unintentional. But I would now be more cautious.
In talking of the economic structure of society, we should never forget – and Marx rarely did .– that we are talking of relations between living, acting, thinking, and above all historical individuals; real men and women. Far from dichotomizing society and the individual, structure and action, Marx is insistent throughout his work that above all we must avoid postulating“society"... as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being' (1844a: 299); ‘my own existence is social activity' (ibid.: 298). Society has no existence independently of individuals: its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they produce and reproduce anew' (1858a: 712; cf. Frisby and Sayer,
1986: 91-6). These relations, moreover, are always in the process of formation and transformation: Marx's continual revolutionizing, in practical activity, of circumstances and selves. ‘Structure’ thus resolves into activities.
'Ideological superstructures' - understood as the forms in which these relations are experientially apprehended - likewise do not mechanically arise', except in analytic shorthand. Indeed I would now argue that the blanket term ‘ideology' is inadequate, except for the most abstract analytic purposes, to elucidate the multiple and complex ways in which social being is articulated in the social consciousness of individuals. It is too blunt an instrument to embrace (for instance) languages, symbols, moralities, artefacts, myths, faiths, traditions, customs; all of these, moreover, more or less institutionalized in churches, legal systems, political rituals, and so on. The concept of ideology has suffered the fate of many in Marx. Where for him its primary use was adjectival and descriptive of qualities illusoriness, class bias, etc. – which some particular historical forms of consciousness had, it has become reified as itself descriptive of a supposed real entity, a noun which sails through history innocent of any reference to real individuals and the lives they lead. And as Marx remarks against Stirner, concepts, ‘if they are divorced from the empirical reality underlying them, can be turned inside out like a glove' (1846a: 362).
It is people – not individuals in the abstract, but definite, socially and historically located individuals - who have ideas, build (and modify) institutions, shape their world. The process through which being is expressed’ in consciousness is an active one. An appropriate image of this is the picture of a sculptor: creating something genuinely novel, but always out of materials - physical and cultural - which constrain (and in that sense, ‘determine')7 what can be made of them. Marx thought the ultimate basis of people's consciousness lay in their experience, which is why it makes sense to seek to ground an explanation of its ideologicality (where such a claim is made) in Erscheinungsformen. But we have hardly begun to explain, with this presumption, the actual empirical forms - think of millenarianism, rough music, carnival, or grands peurs – which social consciousness assumes in actual history. It is a starting-point, no more. Least of all can we simply read off' forms of consciousness from the bare concept of a ‘mode of production’ or its abstractly specified essential relations'.
94
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
95